Big speeches are shrinking with our politics

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‘We must deploy the right measures to deliver the right results’: why most conference speakers got it utterly wrong

To watch and read, over three long weeks, umpteen platform conference speeches is a revealing experience (and don’t say I never do anything for you). It is easy to submit to the unkind thought that, beneath the top crust, British politics is very thin. On paper, some of the speeches were, as Mark Twain said of Wagner’s music, better than they sounded. But the ability to inform, persuade and inspire is no small virtue in a democracy and it is important to work out why, apart from the good performers (Miliband, Hague, Gove) and those with a proper argument to